The Coming Publication Apocalypse

To be clear, we are talking scientific publication. And to save some of you time, there isn’t a lot new here, but the trends are looking to collide sooner rather than later.

What does GG mean by a publication apocalypse? Basically the end of any meaningful evaluation of publications; we are heading rather rapidly into a blizzard of material with no vetting or meaningful review. While there are those who think this will be the most democratic way to distribute science, GG would rather point them to how equally unmoderated blizzards of material have led to minor problems in the political sphere like, oh, insurrection based largely on falsehoods.

What are the trends that are facing the whole concept of journals?

• open access upon publication
• high levels of publication for tenure, promotion and funding
• preprint servers
• junk journals
• reviewer fatigue
• expansion of research into more of academia

Several of these interact in poisonous ways. The perception that faculty must publish more and more frequently to satisfy promotion and tenure committees or funding agencies leads to lots of manuscripts circulating around, all of which need to be reviewed, thus leading to reviewer fatigue. Open access demands on journals are probably putting journals fully into the realm of vanity publishers: their only source of income will be what authors pay. This in turn restricts the support journals can provide to editors and reviewers. Researchers who aren’t flush with funds (for instance, many summer intern programs or honors thesis writers or advanced degree recipients who were supported on teaching assistantships) will be forced to either limit their findings to preprint servers lacking any review or junk journals that claim peer review despite lacking it. The increasing pressure on traditional journal publishers will slow the path to publication, making those junk journals more attractive.

What is more, the feeding frenzy for funding will only get more intense, meaning more proposals requiring more review (and as funding agencies are aware of who is and is not reviewing proposals, most of us make reviewing proposals a higher priority). Many previously purely teaching schools seek “prestige” by having research activities on campus, but this leads to even more pressure on the funding and publication systems.

Finally there is naiveté in proposed solutions. Things like open-access (community) review supposedly will root out the bad science, but even operating as conceived, many papers-good and bad-will not see any meaningful input. Clickbait science seems a likely outcome if having gotten some online feedback is necessary to consider a paper “peer-reviewed.” At worst, open review devolves into flame wars that poison the atmosphere rather than refine and improve a manuscript. Paying for reviews can only be accomplished if somebody finds the money which, as noted above, will have to come from authors’ pockets or diversion of some other revenue stream (e.g., some reduction in meeting fees). Or will AI assistants save us? Again, look at the kinds of algorithms that pollute the social media landscape and then be careful what you wish for; the laws of unintended consequences have not been repealed.

Ideally peer review allows an editor to hold authors’ feet to the fire and have skeptics challenge new work in a more private environment where the authors need not yet feel as though they are being publicly pilloried. Yes, there are problems with peer review, but if the first place papers see any kind of critical examination is public, GG will guarantee that many authors will double-down rather than reexamine and correct their own work. [Yes, GG has particular examples in mind].

So what would the end game look like? Probably a bloated literature with little distinction between previously reputable journals and unmoderated preprint servers. Formal peer review of papers will go away. And problems with confirmation bias would accelerate, especially if search tools follow Facebook’s lead into rewarding you for finding things you already agree with. “Scientific consensus” would become rarer and rarer, especially on issues of public interest where motivated groups could support and amplify contrarian viewpoints. Is that Armageddon phrasing feeling a bit less hyperbolic?

Can this be avoided? GG is pessimistic, but there are potential avenues that require very clear messaging from those gatekeepers of funding, promotion and publication. Funding agencies need to allow for failure; not every grant should produce multiple papers and this message should be carried to researchers whenever funding directors communicate with the research community. Certainly materials created during even a failed project should be archived somewhere, but that archiving should be considered sufficient to satisfy agencies that work was done. (Yes, researchers who consistently only produce failed projects will face the music as grant reviewers point this out, so not an unending “Get out of Jail” free card). Senior faculty in position to control promotion and tenure need to quit counting papers or being flattered by papers in Nature or Science (the scientific equivalent of clickbait) and instead make clear that the research part of tenure and promotion decisions are based on real and substantive contributions to the field, whether put forth in one monograph or a series of papers. This means demanding meaningful responses from external referees and actually making an effort to understand a colleague’s field enough to appreciate (or not) a body of work. And then these two efforts should produce some reduction in the need to publish, allowing editors and reviewers some relief. Preprint servers might have a role to play as places where partial results and datasets can be shared to satisfy the needs of funding agencies and provide colleagues with a sense that progress is being made of some kind. Nearly all science is incremental at some level, so editors will need to have an eye on when some work crosses the threshold of significance more than they do at present.

Will any of this happen? GG has doubts. After all, grant officers aren’t rewarded by having sent out money that didn’t produce something material. Promotion and tenure committee work can be tedious and distracting from other tasks and so being lazy has its rewards. With more journals online, there is less pressure on editors to limit the size of a journal, and indeed in some places more is always better no matter how pathetic the “more” really is. It is hard to fix these short-term incentives without somehow finding a way to make longer term incentives dominate. In these cases, some higher levels within organizations can perhaps be more proactive in demanding attention to these longer term goals.

Maybe GG is utterly wrong; he kind of hopes so. But these trends seem hard to avoid and the outcomes don’t seem encouraging. But maybe some of you reading this have a hand in some of these decisions. Use the power you have and maybe, just maybe, we all can avoid the publication apocalypse.